The Intention Economy

Is "The Attention Economy" just another way for advertisers to skewer eyeballs? And why build an economy around Attention, when Intention is where the money comes from?

That's the question at the front of my mind as I hear one speaker after another struggle to cast light on "The Attention Economy", which is the theme of this year's eTech conference, where I am sitting in an audience, writing this, right now.

Steve is a good friend. I'm a member of his weekly Gillmor Gang podcast. He's talked about attention manytimes on manyshows, and even has a radio show on Sirius called Attention Tech. And yet, I've got to admit, I've never understood more than a fraction of what he's talking about  even when I've given him my full attention. (Which isn't easy for a techie typically given to "continuous partial attention", as Linda Stone pointed out in one of eTech's best talks.)

Steve isn't here at eTech. Nor has he been mentioned in any of the talks I've attended, which is ironic at several levels. Especially since the center of Steve's attention has moved on to Gestures. Steve was slated to talk about Gestures here at eTech, so it looks like I'm stuck with TWO things he still hasn't made clear to me.

Which is cool. Steve is patient with me on stuff I don't understand. Meanwhile, here at the show, I have developed a real problem with the perspective behind what a number of people have been saying about Attention behind the podia. That perspective is sell-side. Its point of view is anchored with sellers, not buyers.

This is natural. Most of us are in business, one way or another. We're sellers who want buyers. And the Web 2.0 economy, like the Web 1.0 economy, continues to repose in the Media Economy, which continues to live off advertising. Even the biggest success story in the Web Economy (through Web 1.x, 2.x and beyond, probably), Google, makes nearly all of its money from advertising.

Google has radically altered the whole advertising business. It's results are far more relevant and personal than anything the old mass media ever came up with. And its system opens participation to countless businesses and categories, of all sizes. But it's still about advertising. And advertising is woefully inefficient. Most of it is wasted. Even by Google.

Recently a friend placed some advertising on Google, and shared some of the report with me. While he only paid for a handful of click-throughs, these were bought at the expense of something like a hundred thousand "exposures". While the costs of wasted exposures may be tolerably low to both the sell and the buy side, they are still real. They subtract value.

There is an old saying in the advertising trade: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." Typical of the advertising business, this a gross exaggeration. Nearly all advertising is wasted. Google may have radically reduced the amount of money wasted in advertising. But it still produces a mountain of waste and expense.

In the hallway yesterday I was talking with r0ml Lefkowitz, who now works with Seth Goldstein at Root.net. r0ml was talking about how his brother, not a techie, didn't understand what r0ml meant by working with "attention". After r0ml explained, his brother said, "Oh, isn't that what they used to call 'eyeballs'?"

Bull's Eye.

Now, I'm sure eyeballs aren't what Steve Gillmor means by Attention. Or what Seth and r0ml mean, either. In fact, r0ml explained to me that Root.net is actually concerned with something much simpler and less creepy than eyeballs; namely, leads. In other words, people who are ready to buy.

Though I'm not much more comfortable being a "lead" than being an "eyeball", at least "lead" regards me as a potential buyer, rather than as yet another "consumer" who might become a buyer if I find a "message" persuasive. The chance of that happening in any individual case is so close to zero that advertising only yields useful numbers in the calculus of mass marketing. Which, even in 2006, at eTech, we still use.

So I'm thinking, Can't we get past that now? Please?

Hence my idea: The Intention Economy.

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.

The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just "branded" by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.

In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, "I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?"  and have the sellers compete for the buyer's business.

This car rental use case is one I've used to illustrate what would be made possible by "user-centric" or "independent" identity, which was also the subject of the cover story in last October's Linux Journal, plus this piece a year earlier, and various keynotes I've given at Digital Identity World, going back to 2002. It is also the use case against which the new open source Higgins project was framed.

Even though I've been thinking out loud about Independent Identity for years, I didn't have a one-word adjective for the kind of market economy it would yield, or where it would thrive. Now, thanks to all the unclear talk at eTech about attention, intentional is that adjective, because intent is the noun that matters most in any economy that gives full respect to what only customers can do, which is buy.

Like so many other things that I write about (including everything I've written about identity), The Intention Economy is a provisional idea. It's an observation that might have no traction at all. Or, it might be a snowball: an core idea with enough heft to roll, and with enough adhesion to grow, so others add their own thoughts and ideas to it.

As for the Linux connection, I believe that The Intention Economy is, by necessity, built on free software and open source principles, practices, standards and code. It's not something that requires any company's "platform" or "environment". That's why, much as I like the services provided by companies like Orbitz (which is built on LAMP, and does a very good job), I believe no company's system can encompass The Intention Economy. The encompassing has to work the other way around. In other words, silos are fine. But the choice can't be "nothing but silos".

While I didn't disagree with anything Michael said (and learned quite a bit by listening attentively to him), I also believe we need to start viewing economies, and markets, from the inside out: from the single buyer toward the surrounding world of sellers. And to start constructing technical solutions to the buyer's problem of getting what he or she wants from markets, rather than the seller's problem of getting buyers' attention.

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The best example of intention in the non-opaque travel world (ie interfaces where you can know the supplier you are buying from) is Orbitz' Deal Detector (warning: I work at Orbitz and may be biased.) If you tell Orbitz when and where you want to go, and the price you're willing to pay, they'll search in the off hours when they have the excess capacity to look for that target. When they find it, Oribtz drops you an email with notification that will click through to the desired search results. It isn't quite the demand aggregation of Eventful's system, but it does "search the future" based on current intention.

Orbitz is indeed built to serve the Intention Economy. Unfortunately, it's a large silo. So are Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity, ITN and the rest of them. Perhaps some day your data with one will federate seamlessly, at your will, with the rest of them. But for now they're middle-silos.

I don't think we'll have the Complete Intention Economy until each of us is independent, and able to express our intentions directly to markets without depending on intermediators.

By the way, i'm not completely sure this can be done. But I am completely sure it's the end-state we're looking for.

Great article Doc, you've pretty much help articulate some of the ideas I have about Web 2.0, whilst, I'm not dismissive as most, I believe there is real value that is waiting to be tapped in Web 2.0 beyond shared calendars and iTunes. I've been banging on about this for a while. I recall posting a comment on Episode 34 of the Gillmor Gang here http://gillmorgang.podshow.com/?p=34.

Essentially, the power of the web can only be unleashed if SOA becomes useable in a user context. I say SOA it could be anything as long as it allows users to Orchestrate Services in a meaningful and re-useable way. Your use case is good. Just like RSS, really believe we need maybe a new type of RSS for Services like a new icon for Services. Thanks for this and I've floated some of the ideas a bit more here http://poseidongroove.wordpress.com/2006/03/17/stuff-im-working-on-mash-...
Michael

I disagree with your ideas on advertising. Yes there are buyers and they want a specific product, but many people like hype and are drawn in by an advertisement that sparks there interest. Walmart is a good example; many people do not need most of the junk they sell, but still when you walk through the place items catch your eye that you probably would not have purchased otherwise.

Basically it goes both ways and advertising, inefficient as it is, brings in a few customers.

Lastly Utopia's never work and economics is never perfect. Free markets are our best inventions so far.

The Intention Economy organizes around what book dealers and rare coin dealers call "The Want List".

For example, abebooks.com can be used two ways. Usually sellers list the books they have and shoppers search the list. Alternately "leads" list the books they want and metadata like price range and if they want the book signed.

abebooks does the matchmaking between sellers (who describe their books) and buyers (who describe their wants).

What's missing is that there is no way for 3rd parties like publishers to search abebook's want list and figure out which titles to re-issue.

This is a great article, and some very interesting sites could be produced that dynamcially respond to our intentions, we've experimented with this in the digital world at Big Hint where the intention is to have an effect with disregard for the response.

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